Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday February 09, 2012 @02:02PM
from the more-money-more-money dept.

redletterdave writes "San Francisco-based game developer Double Fine took to Kickstarter to fund its next game project, and so far, the studio has enjoyed unprecedented success through crowdsourcing. The project, which was announced by the studio's founder Tim Schafer on Wednesday night, has already raised more than $700,000 in less than 24 hours. The funding frenzy has set new Kickstarter records for most funds raised in the first 24 hours, and highest number of backers of all-time, though both of those numbers are still growing. Schafer says he will build a 'classic point-and-click adventure game' in a six-to-eight month time frame, and will document the entire production process for fans to observe and give input on the game's development, which 'will actually affect the direction the game takes.'"

...so as a German I, naturally, had to support this...
But all jokes aside, as a diehard adventure fan I'm really excited about it, especially the documentary part. Let's see what they do with all the excess money.

Excuse the sarcasm, but it has been obvious for a decade that publishers and traditional investment firms into game development have been a defunct and dying breed, it has just taken forever for any real game studios to take the risk to stop getting fucked (losing the copyright to their own media, sharing most of the sales, having no rights to distribution or advertising) to get funding and publicity.

Its current backer pledging rate of about $1,000/minute (yes, I'm serious) is not the norm. Check out other game projects at KickStarter. Most don't even make it to their funding goal when their funding goal is $4,000 - let alone the $400,000 that Double Fine had set.

Double Fine, however, is well-known in the gaming community. As are some of the names that attached themselves to this project. This in term allows them to leverage their existing social networks (followers on twitter, friends at facebook), their industry contacts, and get noticed by other sites (such as Slashdot) more easily.

Compare this, if you will, to the Humble Bundle. Yes, games within the Humble Bundle generally do quite well. But do they do quite well because of the game, or because of the Humble Bundle association?

That said, this is still very cool, and I would be very surprised if this project didn't top the #1 slot for most funded, most over-funded (absolute and percentage-wise), fastest to reach funding goal, highest funding rate and more at KickStarter. In fact, I'm sure KickStarter staff did a double-take at suddenly gaining hundreds of new accounts, about 130 per minute in the last hour, backing this project alone.

While this won't help the new-to-the-scene indie developer, I have to wonder if this isn't the future for mid-sized developers, maybe even film/show producers.

Take a company with a cult following or small but highly-respected developer who has trouble getting published because publishers see their games as "risky" since they aren't Cowadooty Clone 5, put their project on Kickstarter and allow the public to "purchase early" in order to fund it. In fact, if the company has multiple potential projects but can

I have to wonder if this isn't the future for mid-sized developers, maybe even film/show producers.

The problem is that almost all success stories with new business models so far have been something like this:

1) Do normal commercial work2) Get advertised a ton doing your commercial work3) Repeat 1) and 2) for years or decades and accumulate a fan-base4) Do a kickstarter/pay-what-you-want/novel-new-business model and get a shitload of free press5) Profit

The problem is that without accumulating the fan-base first, it wouldn't work. Getting the free press also only works as long as your business model is fresh and new. When everybody is doing their projects via Kickstarter, it will be a hell of a lot harder to get noticed.

That's not to say that this can't work for some cases. If Kickstarter allows a few popular people to do what they want, awesome. But the old industry is still where most of the money is. One million for an adventure game is awesome, but compared to 400 million that Modern Warfare 3 made on launch day, that's still a rather small amount.

Not every game has to be Call of Warfare or Modern Duty, which is sadly all the big studios want to fund. If they can make a profit at $1 million great! Not every game is going to make or needs to make 400 times that.

The success story of Mojang started by Minecraft being features on the Valve blog if I remember correctly, the game from which Minecraft took most of the ideas, InfiniMiner, wasn't so lucky. AngryBirds just had the luck of being high up in the iTunes Store and in turn creating a media hype which lead to a feedback loop that got it more hype. If it wouldn't have been for classical media hyping that game up to eleven, they would have gotten nowhere near as successful (helps of course that those guys are prett

there are only a very limited number of spots in the spotlight of the media

Um... duh?

You can't drive a whole industry like that, those games are the exception.

There's a lot more to it than that. First, as you pointed out, there's a very limited number of spots in the spotlight. Just like in any industry, there's only room for so many players, because there's only so much demand. Not every game is going to be a huge hit like that, not because they didn't follow your steps 1-3 in your previous post but because there's just not enough demand. The point is that any game from any studio has the potential to reach those heights if it meets the demand better

Decentralized funding will always triumph because a small number of people spending large amounts of money is dumb.

A small number of people spending large amounts of money is exactly what crowd funding is.

Big commercial successes work by selling to the masses, to the people that don't deeply care about the product, but that run across it at the supermarket, because it's on the Steam front page or because they have heard about it in the news. The informed consumer that reads reviews and keeps informed about a product is a tiny minority.

Compare this to another project also breaking records on Kickstarter at the moment - the Order of the Stick reprint.

Yes, the guy's been writing it for a while, and yes, he's built up a fan-base, but it's not been his day job, and it's not exactly "commercial" - it's a free webcomic. And yet, when he started the kickstarter to try and fund print runs of his product, he almost equalled this well-known, established, commercial player, that (I assume) has a lot more backing it than one guy drawing stick figures. The OOTS kickstarter has reached around $580,000 last time I looked, and is cruising for the 5th most successful kickstart ever.

Compare this to another project also breaking records on Kickstarter at the moment - the Order of the Stick reprint.

I don't doubt that some people can have large successes on Kickstarter. What I have a problem is with people calling that the end of the regular game/publishing industry. A big successful Indie projects make what? One million? Two? Three? Maybe ten if they get really really lucky. A big commercial game cost something like 25 million to build and that's the cheap low end game, the really big ones can cost multiple times that amount.

There is simply an order of magnitude or two between the money that gets move

oh yeah.. $400,000,000 might be a bit much (and even worse for some projects), you're right - got a little carried away there;)Let's go for 'over-funded by percent for projects with goal higher than $100,000'. Although things get a little arbitrary then:)

That said, this is still very cool, and I would be very surprised if this project didn't top the #1 slot for most funded
I happened to look up the most funded game project on KickStarter the other day. The top funded game (and you can question whether or not it's a "game" since it mostly seems to be about artificially intelligent creatures in a game world) came in around $56,000. So, yeah, Double Fine blew all the game projects out of the water.http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/video%20games/most-funded [kickstarter.com]

It's hilarious how surprised the devs' comments are. They expected the fundraiser would flop, and then they made their requested amount in less than a day... twice! I bet they are amazed and horrified that there was an actual business model there that everyone missed all this time.

But that's not a guarantee. I can put my money in wanting a Catalan Linux port, but they get my money whether they deliver it or not. If projects on this scale are going to go via Kickstarter, they're going to need to start adding conditions, like several concurrent minipledge drives.

Ee gads, what a troll. I used Catalan as an example -- I am a native English speaker, so the finished product is going to be in MY language anyway. Catalan is neither artificial or invented, and how on Earth you think the Nazi's have anything to do with it is beyond me.

My point was that they are selling the product couched in vague terms: "more money means more languages (but we're not going to commit to anything)", "more money means more formats (but we're not going to commit to anything)". If the Kicks

And speak with more than just your money; they're giving you a direct opportunity to speak with your, er, online voice! Sure, you'll be one of 21004 (at this moment) people, but they're aware that a multi-platform release is something people are interested in already. Additional voices claiming support for it might prompt them to devote additional resources towards it.

The more money they get, the more will be left for ports, amongst other things. So I would expect that at $800k, they will at least give OSX a try (according to the kickstarter page you obviously did not read), and if it will keep on going, iOS, Android and maybe even Linux would happen.

It's Windows only if they make the $400k. Excess money they will use to first port to OSX, then Andriod/Linux. They arent just going to pocket the extra, they will feed it back into the game. How much they need before it's worth porting to Linux? No idea, but they're currently 3x their initial goal, and only 2 days into their 33 day goal.

You can always wait for the Linux version and buy it or you can speak with your wallet and help.

Schafer says he will build a 'classic point-and-click adventure game' in a six-to-eight month time frame, and will document the entire production process for fans to observe and give input on the game's development, which 'will actually affect the direction the game takes.'"

So basically they've made a slow online social interaction game, about making a game.

Btw, to those who don't know who Tim Schafer is, he was the Lead Designer on Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. Ron Gilbert, who is also on the team, is the guy who designed Monkey Island. This is the stuff of legends, people. I never thought this could ever happen.. Kickstarter really works!

Was this an actual factual idea that Notch proposed? If so, I sure hope it goes somewhere. I love Psychonauts immensely and would be thrilled at the prospect of a sequel (still have it installed on my HDD even). And Mojang certainly has the cash to spare...

I should go back and try it again. I remember trying for many hours (literally), over days (after being frustrated and quitting), and not being able to finish it. I seem to remember I get a few "partial levels" into it (jumping onto the ferris-wheel-like things), and then dying soon afterwards.

Then again, I *still* had hoped this was for Psychonauts 2, and was originally going to post that in this thread.

"Fairly easily"? Means that, while I had many attempts, I made definite progress with most attempts. From memory, it took me a little over an hour to finish. Maybe I just discovered the tricks of the level a little quicker than most. It felt challenging, but manageable, to me.

I remember getting stuck a little at the point where the figment dad is throwing flameballs at you while you're walking a tightrope. But that was very soon after a soft save point, so it was easy to repeat and get the timing right

1) While it wasn't, as you say, quite as hard as it's remembered to be, it DID represent a sharp spike in the difficulty curve, especially the first time through. In a case of semi-Nintendo-hard, when you play it without having experienced it before, you don't have the memorization down, which makes it tougher.

2) Nightmare Fuel. Oh, gods, the Nightmare Fuel.

If Mojang's offer to fund a sequel goes through, I'm buying copies of Minecraft for

I'll concede your point. As far as platforming skills is concerned, the Meat Circus had a jump in difficulty, 'scuse the pun. I took more time to solve levels like Black Velvetopia or Gloria's Theater, but that difficulty was from a puzzle solving perspective.

Nightmare Fuel? Oh, all the meat everywhere! Hmmm, you know, it didn't bother me. As you know, there was a storyline based reason for all the meat appearing everywhere, as well as the bunnies.

Btw, to those who don't know who Tim Schafer is, he was the Lead Designer on Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. Ron Gilbert, who is also on the team, is the guy who designed Monkey Island. This is the stuff of legends, people. I never thought this could ever happen.. Kickstarter really works!

Eh... Granted, times may be different, as may be these people, and I'd love to see this work, but I believe gamers said the same thing about John Romero and Tom Hall when Ion Storm came about...

Brutal Legend is one of those games that was always fun, always interesting, always funny. I never wanted it to be over. The setting and the attention and love for the world of music that I grew up with made me so willing to forgive anything about the game that was not awesome. Which is an untestable hypothesis, since everything in the game was extremely awesome.

I would play in the world of Brutal Legend for many more hours (and dollars) if I could.

As much as I love Psychonauts, after playing through Brutal Legend twice, I would pass up a Psychonauts sequel in favor of a BL2. The game got a lot of criticism for certain gameplay elements, but those didn't bother me (I thought the combat system was pretty cool), and the world just left me wanting more. Too bad so many people hated it.

Ron is with Tim Schafer for this project!
Thats the best ting on this story! Like most here I literally grew up with Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island and so I am totally looking forward
to this game, whatever it might be!
Best thing what they should do with the money is buying the Monkey Island franchise from LA... and maybe get Steve Purcell in the boat too!

Notably, that each line of communication increases complexity exponentially. I am not saying the project will fail, with that kind of funding it might well be successful...it just seems to me like a pandora's box of problems and delays.

In this instance that would be true, as each person contributing to the project would not be expected to create a line of communication with ever other participant who had already contributed. In the traditional mythical-man-month model, every added developer was assumed to have to establish a line of communication with all existing developers...make growth exponential.

I was making a correlation that wasn't 100% the same, but the article does say, "...the communication wont be a one-way street." I am sur

Game publishers the world over probably just thought to themselves, "Oh crap."
Publishers of any medium are less needed every day, and I think a lot more people just realized it. Why even bother, if you're a big enough name, to try to get funding from a publisher when you can cut out the middle man?

Why even bother, if you're a big enough name, to try to get funding from a publisher when you can cut out the middle man?

This.

In the future, a "publisher" will be more like a professional public consultant; people who are good at directing other people's attention to worthy projects.

Either that or despotic tyrants, with private armies grinding the populace beneath their heels, in a desperate attempt to keep the appearance of control over gate keys that were long ago remanded to the Phantom Zone.

It isn't an investment in the shares and/or dividends, you are simply pledging some money up-front in order to support the game being made. What you get, other than the game being made and you getting a copy (probably) cheaper than the price it will be release to the rest of the world at, is clearly documented on the page.

It's not an investment, it's patronage of the arts. It's a very old way of raising funds, but in the old days, funding arts was an ostentation. "Oh look at me, I funded an opera!" Also, there were such things as "subscriber lists" for books in days gone by. For things that were a bit "niche", a group would have a whipround to fund someone to put it together -- they were the "subscribers" and they'd all get listed inside the book. People did this because the books supported a cause that was close to their heart. Many books of Scottish Gaelic poetry were funded this way. Local history societies would do similar things to fund the publishing of books from their area.

This is great for Double fine. I don't see why they've gotten such a brisk response. It's worse than a Gamestop preorder. Give over your money now, for maybe a game in a year. Oh you can watch us make it and join our forums. The game target selling price, not mentioned. Topic: adventures game that's it . I don't see any more detail on the website.. Not even a commitment to not use onerous DRM. This isn't some tiny scrappy Indie, it's a house with AAA titles under it's belt. I like adventure game

I don't consider forum access and access to the making of to really be a feature. The only thing I left out is beta access, which I guess you could argue is a feature. Clearly that's their pitch and clearly there are people willing to put up money for it. That's cool it's a free country. I'm free to think it's silly.

This is a downgraded version of preordering the super deluxe version of a game which frequently comes with a poster and a making of the game DVD. The only think missing is collectabl

I have to say, this strikes me as a damn fine idea. Even if people do not participate in the kickstarter itself the game will still be on sale on Steam once completed, and with a large marketing headstart. win-win.

The kickstarter project says their goal was $400,000 ($300,000 for the game and $100,000 for the video documentary). I looked at the kickstarter page and saw a picture of the Double Fine team. There were 47 people in the picture. I have to ask - how do you pay 47 people with a budget of $300,000? I realize they're around $900,000 right now, but that's still only $19,000 per person, which would only get you a few months work. How are these numbers realistic? Or am I looking at it the wrong way -- should I (and everybody else on this thread) look at the kickstarter money not as funding the game's development, but as a way to create the startup funds for the game, afterwhich they'll be looking for lots of investors?

Keep in mind, this is before the game even goes up for sale, which I'm sure will generate additional revenue. It's already a company, they have other revenue sources through sales of their previous games, etc. This is the initial investment capitol not "ZOMG we need to feed 47 people" capitol.

before the game even goes up for sale, which I'm sure will generate additional revenue.
I assume you mean "pre-sales" rather than actual sales? Because they money has to be there for development before the game is released. I'm not sure what the time gap will be between the pre-sales and the release, but it seems like the kickstarter project is a "pre-sale" when you buy-in at the $15 amount.

It's already a company, they have other revenue sources through sales of their previous games, etc.
Perhaps. A

Part of it is that they intend to release in October so it's going to be a short dev cycle. The other critical component is that it's a point and click adventure which means they're looking at less than 10 people working on it full time. $400k would be about right for a 6 month project and 5 people.

I doubt they ever intended to only make $400k though. It wouldn't be exclusively available to contributors. You can safely assume for every contributor you would probably get 2 buyers. So more like 1.2 mil

Well, to be fair, the grammar was much better than what a regular 16 year old is capable of.

I do disagree about the rant on Brutal Legend, though. It wasn't perfect, but it was quite fun, interesting characters and story, and I thought it was a very good game. Not excellent, but definitely very good. The combination of melee and real time strategy needed a bit more work, but was certainly inventive.

This is how it works. A relatively small portion of the population donates money to some "artists". They create something new which also creates jobs for those artists. So now the economy has a few more jobs. Those artists spend more money, which creates more jobs. But now we not only have more jobs, but we also have new "art".

Society is now better off because it has more art. That art sells, which in-turn brings in even more money to the artists, which creates more jobs